Summary: HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION DESIGN: UNDERSTANDING
USER NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS
Julie A. Adams
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
Goal-Directed Task Analysis is being applied to assessing the needs and requirements for developing
novel techniques and tools to permit a small number of humans to supervise large robotic teams. The
paper presents a preliminary overall goal hierarchy as well as a preliminary communication goal
hierarchy based upon the initial analysis. This research involves working directly with the Nashville
Metro Police department's Bomb Squad and the Nashville Metro Fire Department's HAZMAT team.
The focus is the assessment of actual user needs and requirements employing well-defined user
centered design practices in combination with Goal-Directed Task Analysis. The resulting Goal-
Decision-SA structure will be employed to develop potential human-robot interaction designs for
further qualitative and qualitative evaluation. The objective is to successfully integrate robots into the
Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive device search and rescue tasks such that
the robots complement and augment the current human capabilities.
INTRODUCTION
A long history of employing teleoperation to control both
robotic manipulators as well as mobile robots exists. While
there are many success stories (i.e. Adams, 1995; Bruemmer